Los Angeles Art Association proudly presents 4 solo exhibitions by artists Tanner Goldbeck, Keiko Inoh, Rachel Kaster and Robert Nelson. The reception will take place on Saturday October 20, 2018, 6 - 9pm at Gallery 825 and the show runs through November 30, 2018.

Robert Nelson

Robert Nelson's hyper-real/surreal works are concerned with dichotomies: innocence/corruption, the infinite/the finite, past/future, good/evil. His works are bombastic examples of an artist who is at ease layering wide areas of flat color with illustrative drawing that shows off his technical skills and knowledge of the history of art. In the works in this solo show, Dialogs with the Future he juxtaposes images culled from different sources to explore the relationship between the world today and an imagined future. Using elements from art history and popular culture, he fuses the serious with the humorous creating evocative, challenging and sometimes disturbing works. Nelson's world view is presented as a series of fragments that the viewer can connect in their mind, arriving at their own conclusions. His artworks are catalysts for thought about how the past influenced the present, and how the present can challenge and hopefully change the future.

Tanner Goldbeck

Thrift stores and art galleries have always been a part of artist Tanner Goldbeck's identity. Goldbeck is interested in questioning our perceptions of value and worth on a social scale. If you strip them of their formalities and look at their basic operations, they do have a few functions in common. Objects are on display for purchase, discounts are offered, sales occur and customers are encouraged to examine the items. A lifelong cause and effect relationship combined into one, semi-metaphoric social experiment. Initially inspired by Claes Oldenburg's 1961 store in lower Manhattan, Goldbeck now presents the exhibition All Unattended Children Will Be Sold. Goldbeck wants to superimpose two behaviorally opposite social structures on top of one another and see what unfolds. Each visitor must review at least some portion of their own behavioral practices upon entering the room.

Keiko Inoh

Keiko Inoh's newest iteration of her art practice, Shadow is an installation comprising adventurous projection of sculptural constructions. This projection becomes like a negative of a photograph, and the shadow projected on the wall becomes a "picture". The audience can witness a camera-less "photograph". The turntable ("lazy Susan") on which this sculpture rests rotates by hand power. The audience can enjoy the shadow and sculpture of the continuous city at their own speed. The image "Shadow" was drawn from the novelist Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In his story, this city is an imaginary city that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about in a fantasy encounter. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and designs, cities and the dead, trading cities, hidden cities and invisible cities. Inoh views the shadow as a metaphor for vague information and something invisible.

Rachel Kaster

Well-known for her sculptural work in glass and steel, in more recent work, Rachel Kaster has explored our changing relationship to memory, and more specifically emotional attachments, or the private memories in which we become emotionally invested. Using dolls, children's toys, domestic décor accessories and the trinkets that might be found on charm bracelets, the original fetishes of memory and emotional attachments, Kaster fashioned her bricolage into the super sized simulacra of actual charm 'bracelets' to be hung against a wall or support, or in any manner of suspension between walls, floors and ceilings. For her current show Anamnesis, Kaster is constructing an installation of suspended pendants, image transparencies, small photographs or snapshots, and heirlooms in a kind of charm bracelet-fetish necklace chandelier to fill an entire gallery - a web of memory moving between shadowy blur and crystalline projection to be recast and reconstructed between the moment of perception and the viewer's imagination.

Los Angeles Art Association is proud to present its next group exhibition, The Non-Objective Moment, an all-media exploration of abstraction juried by Lonnie Lardner. In addition to The Non-Objective Moment, LAAA will present solo exhibitions by Laura and Dean Larson, Lynne McDaniel and Lori Pond. The Opening reception is Saturday, September 8, 2018 (all shows run through October 12, 2018)

Spanning several years, Laura and Dean Larson's new solo show The Council Gathers in Timemarks the completion of their third collaborative body of work. In continuing the use of sculpted human-animal hybrid bronze figures, the duo's playful mixture of mediums sets the stage for unforeseen lyrical encounters. The work's retracing of historical events through its 'council' of human-animal hybrid characters are presented independently as sculpture, through photographs and a limited-edition art book. The bronze-casted figures reference the poses and scale of The Mourners, a series of 14th and 15th century alabaster sculptures of monks and clerics encircling a tomb. With nineteen figures in all, their animal heads reveal themselves to be among various endangered species. Mounted continuously across three gallery walls will be an archival pigment print on canvas. The Council Gathers in Time depicts the travels of the Council from the home planet to this planet as they come to discover the cause of its sixth mass extinction. This journey continues across the Baltic Sea, Scandinavia, Finland, Russia and Germany. At 17 inches tall and over 23 feet in length, the horizontally extended frieze recalls the medieval masterpiece known as the Bayeux Tapestry, recalling the Battle of Hastings in the 11th century.

Lynne McDaniel's work uses the language of the landscape to explore current events, as well as the sometimes-surprising beauty of urban existence. Her current body of work Boom! is inspired by Chinese hand scrolls, creating landscapes on paper using not the traditional ink and brush, but charcoal and oil paint. The work engages the scroll paintings in a dialog, using the same elements of panoramic format, monochromatic colors, and atmospheric quality. But rather than the dreamy, idealized scenes of the Chinese paintings, the work depicts the environmental and ecological changes caused by natural disasters, human intervention, and the passage of time. Often using news photos as sources, she paints the landscape then disrupts the image to indicate the place where things go wrong. The incursion can be a subtle dash of color, or a more violent stroke or erasure. The mostly black and white palette evokes the memory and nostalgia of vintage photographs, while small touches of vermillion echo the bright red seals on the scroll paintings. The destabilization or interruption of what is happening in the paintings reflects the artist's growing uncertainty about what is happening on the larger canvas of our world.

Lori Pond's photo-based project Bosch Redux takes flight from the unprecedented imagination of Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. Pond became fascinated with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as a teenager when his limitless imagination and intricately detailed images captured Pond's mind. In Bosch Redux, Pond hones in on details that occupy the background of his work. The artist uses her friends as models, hires prop makers, prosthetic designers, makeup and wardrobe to aid her in the recreation of small tableaus from Bosch's works, mostly from his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Pond feels compelled to use the medium of photography to try to understand him, to inhabit his world and mind. Pond painstakingly recreates in photographs the details that sprang from the mind of a painter five hundred years ago, counterintuitively creating new and compelling contemporary works.

Los Angeles Art Association is proud to present the second iteration of Hecho a Mano (Made by Hand). Juried by Curator Jill Moniz, the exhibit will feature objects created by emerging artists and explore issues of quality workmanship and cultural heritage. The exhibit opens Saturday, Saturday August 11, 2018 and runs through August 24, 2018.

Out Thereis a very special all media exhibition celebrating the LGBT experience during West Hollywood's Pride Month festivities. Join us for the Opening Reception on Friday, June 8, 6-9 pm. Exhibit runs through June 15th.